KING: The danger of becoming desensitized to the bigotry of Donald Trump and Ted Cruz

Audience members throwing punches at Trump rallies is no longer unusual. (SAM MIRCOVICH/REUTERS)

It's happening.

The violence and bigotry and ugliness spewing from the campaigns of both Donald Trump and Ted Cruz is so regular, so consistent, so predictable and frequent, that millions of Americans are growing numb to it.

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Think about it...

We live in a time where so many people have been assaulted and injured by Trump supporters that if it happened again tonight or tomorrow it would hardly make the news. We've already seen people being punched and spat on and stomped on and elbowed in the face and called racial slurs at his events. It happening again likely won't go viral, won't be the top headline, and may not even be covered by mainstream media.

Fortune Magazine recently determined that the Donald Trump campaign has deep social media ties to white supremacists — and not just that he retweets them regularly, which he does. Their support of him and his engagement with them is vast. Somehow, this isn't the headline gripping our nation. It appears that our expectations of him have gotten so low that such an explosive analytical report from Fortune barely caused a ripple.

On the day Brussels was attacked, Ted Cruz asserted that American law enforcement officers should drastically step up their patrols of Muslim neighborhoods in the United States to "secure" them and prevent radicalization. This a horrendous idea driven by xenophobia. It should've discounted him from the race. Mayor de Blasio and NYPD Commissioner Bratton blasted Cruz for it, but hours later, Jeb Bush proudly endorsed him.

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What's frightening is that it didn't quite shock us that Ted Cruz basically suggested an apartheid state for Muslim American communities. He has a history of making horrific statements. We didn't just learn that he has a bigoted view of the world, we've known that. Consequently, his statement on patrolling Muslim American neighborhoods hardly resonated outside of deeply political circles.

This man is a U.S. Senator and a popular presidential candidate and he just suggested something we didn't even hear from mainstream politicians in the aftermath of 9/11.

Now, he has doubled down on his call to ban all Muslims, except perhaps heads of state, from entering the United States — renewing a panic among many Muslim Americans who have no idea if this is what our future looks like.

But, Trump remains. He won the Republican primary in Arizona by a landslide Tuesday night and has accumulated victories in 20 states all over the country.

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Many privileged people are in a position to become desensitized to the bigotry of Trump and Cruz because their proposals and their threats aren't quite aimed at them or their loved ones. This desensitization runs the risk of becoming normal thoughts and ideas that should not exist in the mainstream. Trump and Cruz could be pushing our new normal so far to the right that a whole swath of America doesn't even bat an eye when they say or do something horrific.

For tens of millions of Americans who cannot afford to simply bend with the bigotry of these men, even the fact that millions seem not to be bothered by them is a painful insult.